10 essential Greenaway films

[Magical Realist]

"To properly acquaint oneself with the work of English auteur Peter Greenaway is to become a student of the neo-baroque, postmodernism, art history, and religious allegory. Trained as a painter, Greenaway’s passion for the films of Bergman, Fellini, Godard, Pasolini, and Resnais led him to begin a career in experimental film in the early 1960’s. His first film, The Death of Sentiment (1965) was a pastiche of several elements that he would later explore throughout his oeuvre: architecture, religion, death and words as images.

Few filmmakers have spoken as extensively on their work or submitted to so much academic analysis as Greenaway; throughout his discussions of his own work runs a thread of dissatisfaction with cinema. People today, Greenaway opines, suffer from visual illiteracy.

To paraphrase his many lectures, interviews and discussions: we live in a text-based world, an “age of the screen” in which cinema is the illustration of text rather than a method of autonomous creation. To best understand Greenaway’s films (and especially the “essential” ones that follow), we first have to understand his position as a skeptic of the boundaries of cinema and hi

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I've been a fan of Greenaway ever since I was shocked by his study in post-monarchal brutality in 2001: "The Cook, the Thief, his Wife, and her Lover". Every foray into Greenaway land is to find oneself simultaneously assaulted and seduced by a wildly inventive bricolage of the sacred and the perverse. You feel you are watching the visual deconstruction of Western values and the restoration of cinema as a pure artform all at once. Here's many of his films that I've seen. Remember thru all of these films Greenaway's underlying theme of non-narrative forms of meaning. It may actually help you get thru most of them!

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